Guest Post: Real Science in Modern SF

Real Science in Modern Science Fiction

By Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com/

I’m a scientist. I have graduate and undergraduate degrees in four sciences, as well as various certifications in several others. I’m what is sometimes called a polymath. I worked for more than two decades in the civilian and military space programs (NASA and DoD), and then retired and started writing science fiction mysteries, using my background and education to enlighten my writing.

I also “consult” for other authors in my fields of expertise. This includes everyone from NYT best-selling authors to writers who haven’t yet finished their first novel, and everything in between. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it’s challenging, and sometimes… it just gets plain weird.

Take that NYT author. I got an email saying, “Hey, Steph, I got this ship that has to be able to travel from X to Y, has to be able to execute this particular trajectory, and is gonna get into a battle with the Big Bads. What size power plant does it need to have?”

“Um, okay. How big is it? You know, how massive?”

“I dunno.”

“What’s its payload weight?”

“I dunno.”

“How fast does it have to move?”

“I dunno.”

Uhboy, I think. Well, I can always do some research and see what I can come up with that might help. After all, I can put some boundaries on all of that myself, based on what I already know.

So I spent a couple of days digging around looking, around writing my own books. I spent about half and half, writing mine, and researching his. Until one day I get another email.

“Oh, by the way, Steph, that ship has four two-petawatt energy weapons on it. Does that help?”

Facepalm. Because my researches all indicated that any one of those was a bigger power draw than the rest of the ship (which was not required to traverse interstellar space, as far as I knew, so had a relatively low power draw for general spacing).

“Um, yeah, that helps a lot. I think if you run with a nine- or ten-petawatt power plant, you’ll be good.”

Problem solved.

Then there was the author who wanted to have an asteroid hit an island in the ocean and take it out. So she estimated what she thought was a big enough asteroid to do that, and asked me to double-check it. So I did, because asteroid impacts has been a hobby of mine for years, and I was at one time on an impact effects mitigation working group. Based on all that, I knew her fictional asteroid was too big, but she wanted hard numbers, so I ran them.

“Um, hon,” I said, “you just wiped out the Pacific Rim.”

Eh. It was order-of-magnitude Chicxulub-sized. Not quite, or the whole planet woulda been in trouble. But close. She was boggled; she had no idea that a chunk of rock falling from the sky could pack that kind of kinetic energy. Well, to be honest, unless you’ve taken some serious physics in school, you won’t know that. And most people haven’t. Which is why I consult for other authors.

Most people don’t even realize how close Chelyabinsk, Russia came to disaster, some years back. That was a SMALL asteroid; I’d tend to term it a large meteorite, but these days those are considered just piddling little rocks like you’d skip across a creek. But the Chelyabinsk asteroid came in at a very shallow angle. The thermal stresses on it caused it to basically explode in atmosphere; that’s called a bolide. But the fact that it was traveling close to horizontal is what saved the city. If it had been inbound with a more vertical trajectory, the shock wave from the explosion, coupled with the bow shock through the atmosphere, would have hit straight down in a cone instead of spreading out, and flattened everything and everyone beneath it.

I had one publisher pop me a story she wanted me to evaluate for her. It involved a UFO coming in over DC. It’s been a few years, but as I recall, it came screaming in from space, directly over the city, didn’t slow down, crossed over the Capitol dome, swung around the Washington monument, and came to a screeching halt in front of the White House.

I explained to her – in some detail – that the bow shock from that stunt would probably have flattened the entire National Mall.

She went back to the author and told him to rewrite it. He refused. He said her subject-matter expert (me) didn’t know what he was talking about, because UFOs were all flying saucers that didn’t partake of normal physics, so of course his scenario was perfectly fine.

I asked if this was an inhabited spacecraft, and was told it was. Whereupon I explained that if they wanted to stay in one piece, even with advanced technology, there were certain things that HAD to be done. (One of those is not to stop dead from high speed unless you want your crew plastered as a layer of protoplasm on the forward bulkheads.) And if they were containing an environment suited to life, they had to have a certain physicality to the hull. And if the hull was a physical thing, then he’d just flattened the National Mall, complete with the Federal government. (Which might not necessarily be a bad thing. But it would be unfortunate, and somewhat inconvenient, at least for a while.)

The guy refused to change it – this was his first book and it was an unsolicited submission – and the publisher came back to me with, “What should I do? The rest of the book is decent…”

“Okay, stop and think for a minute,” I told her. “Fine, so the rest of the book is interesting. But would you really want the handling of him, when he’s just told you that he knows more than someone who spent multiple decades in the space program? Who did that sort of thing for a living? Who knows about re-entry, sonic booms and bow shocks, bleeding off speed/energy in roll reversals, and letting a Space Shuttle cool down before anyone approaches it once it’s at full stop on the ground? When he hasn’t done any of those things? If he’s this protective about the opening scene, how is he gonna be when it comes time to edit his whole manuscript?”

“Ooo,” she groaned. “Good point.”

He didn’t get a contract from her.

I remember one request for my help that didn’t go well, though I can’t remember who asked it. I was asked to verify some situation about a rotating space station, and determine what kind of rotation rate it needed to enable a certain thing to be observed out the ports, while at the same time providing X gravitational force equivalent. It took a bit of doing, because a rotating wheel station will not have the same simulated gravity at all distances from the center of rotation. I went off and dug up some data, and then ran some calculations. All told, it took a couple-three hours. The results I got indicated that he needed to modify his concept just a little, but I worked out what that modification needed to be, then presented him with the finished calculations and proposed tweaks. Nothing major, just some adjustments to station dimensions and a couple descriptive mods.

“Mm,” he said, looking at what I’d given him. “Nah, I think I’m just gonna go with it the way I wrote it.”

I was nice. I did NOT say, “Then why did you bother asking me?”

I also found myself much too busy to run any research for him after that.

I can go on and on like this, good and bad. Some fun, some cool, some disgustingly dismissive. (And don’t even ask me to get started on the “science” that gets presented in movies and TV. You won’t like the brick that comes hurtling out of your computer, tablet, or phone screen.)

Just remember several things when you read that “hard” SF novel. One, not all “hard” SF actually is. Two, it’s FICTION. We make stuff up; that’s WHY it’s fiction. Three, just because it’s a popular concept in SF doesn’t mean it actually works the way we’d like – or even works at all!

~~~~~~~

Stephanie Osborn, award-winning Interstellar Woman of Mystery, is a 20+-year space program veteran with multiple STEM degrees. She has authored, co-authored, or contributed to some 50 books to date, including Burnout, Displaced Detective, Gentleman Aegis, and the Division One series, her take on the urban legend of mysterious people who make evidence...disappear. Book one of the Division One series, Alpha and Omega, is currently on sale in Kindle, and available in KU:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CNBZ7HZ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3